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ANTH 416, Economic Anthropology  Take-Home Final  A. Dewey

For this exam you should choose material from one society, or if you wish from two societies for a comparison. The case material may come from ethnography, or from your own experience, or another source, but please check with me before you make a final choice so we can be sure you have enough material to work with. When you have chosen the case material I want you to do an analysis of it describing how the economic system works. You may choose to look at just one aspect if the system is a large-scale one and you have plenty of information, or you can do a general description and analysis. The following questions are suggestions as to how to proceed with an analysis. You probably won't want to answer all of them. In fact your case material probably won't have enough information to allow you to answer all of them. Pick and choose among them for the ones most useful for you analysis.

1. What are the basic consumptions unts in the society (for example, single person household, muclear family household, extended family, commune)? Does this unit produce some or all of the things it consumes and the services it uses, or does it buy all or most of the things it uses?

2. What sorts of production units exist (for example, family farms, Cottage industry establishments, Mom and Pop stores, mechanized factories)?

3. How are raw material acquired (for example kin rights to hunting territory, lineage farm land, land bought for money, steel bought from a factory)?

4. How does the production unit acquire labor (for example, call on family, kin, reciprocities, wages, labor obligations in a redistributive or mobilizative system)?

5. Is there a market system present? Is it of major importance in the lives of most people or is there much production for the subsistence of the basic consuming unit?

6. What sorts of capital exist (for example, hand tools, heavy machinery, education/skills, cash, kin and other social obligations, reciprocal labor exchanges)?

7. Is there any information about the kinds of cooperation and competition existing between production and consumption units? Put another way: what relationships seems structured as Zero-Sum Games, and which are Non-Zero Sum Games?

8. What things seem to be scarce (capital, resources, labor energy, time)?

9. Analyze the systems of exchange in terms of Polanyi's categories of Reciprocity, Redistribution, and Market Exchange. Do you see indications of the existence of separate (or fairly separate) Spheres of Exchange? What sorts of goods and services are transacted in each type of exchange (reciprocity etc.) and in each sphere is you can define them? What sorts of role relationships are the people involved in each type of transaction playing (for example are reciprocities between kinsmen, political rivals etc.)?

You will see that the questions often overlap as they look at the same thing from different angles. Working out the way these overlappings approaches give different ways to understand the system and the relationships within it is one of the things I hope you will get out of doing the analysis. If you have any questions do come and see me.